☀ Today's Poem: "Critique of Pure Reason" Catherine Barnett

With him pressed so close beside her,
she couldn't sleep. Perhaps it was his skin,
or the rain. It kept raining.

She lay there trying to remember
exactly how many thoughts she could have.
Was it 30,000 or 70,000? Per hour?

Or was it per minute?
She'd heard from someone
who'd heard from someone

who heard the number, whatever it was,
from an HVAC specialist.
She placed his hand back on her chest

while another fifty thoughts leaked out.
They'd both been reading César Aira,
who said that for every sentence you write

there are many implicit questions.
She was surprised to find herself still wearing
the shirt he'd pulled down from the neck

to reach the rest of her. The shirt
was like a second skin, color of her nipples.
Pale burgundy. It held her together,

kept her from flying right out of her body.
His T-shirt had a hole, a tear near the hem,
which she only later remembered noticing.

Fingering.
How many other thoughts had she had
while her body was responding like that?

She didn't know if pleasure counted as thought,
or were they separate categories.
The smell of someone lingered.

Or was it cilantro? The insoles
of the red shoes in her bedroom?
Secondhand. They were like ballet shoes

though she was not a dancer.
The fact of the shoes elicits hundreds
or thousands of thoughts,

and if she could just keep writing
at top speed she'd be able to count them.
She can type 120 words a minute,

and let's say a thought averages fifteen words:
she could type approximately 480 thoughts every hour.
With a pen she writes more slowly.

To whom is she writing?
Over a small glass of whiskey she'd asked
what was the most debauched he'd ever been.

"Dropping acid with a friend," he said.
She didn't tell him about lying on the floor
half-naked with the red ballet shoes beside her

in an apartment not far from the Sacré-Cœur
the night someone drove a truck at high speed
down the crowded sidewalk.

Those shoes—those thoughts—
How quickly they move
across the 90,000 miles of neurons

packed into her head. How long
had the shoes been worn by someone else
before she wore them?

Isn't there something morbid about that?
Or is it like taking psilocybin,
you realize everyone is connected,

the living and the dead?
Even if it all ends tomorrow,
she'll have been grateful he awakened her.

She'd come to expect a life without much pleasure
other than rain and sleep and solitude
and whatever she could make in her notebook

and in the narrow galley kitchen buffeted by cabinets
filled with glass jars and oils and a canister of propane
in case of emergency.

The overhead light has been out for years.
Why? Why can't she climb the ladder,
unscrew the bulbs, fix the wiring?

She found him sitting quietly at the kitchen table
where she could smell the basil she'd watched
him tear into small pieces the night before:

basil and sun and man: and then she wiped
a few grains of coffee from the counter
into the other irreducible qualia of morning.